You Can’t Always Get What You Want
When we sign on for something, sometimes we can visualize exactly what it will be, and it turns out to be exactly that. Sometimes we predict, but it is quite different than we have envisioned. Sometimes we have no sense at all, but we sign on presuming we will figure it out, as we go.
There was something of an immediate and intuitive draw that Jesus had upon each of the disciples as he asked them to come and follow him. I wonder if there were many times in the course of the three years they traveled with Jesus and learned from him, when they said, “This is nothing like I imagined it.” More extremely, they might have thought, “I did not sign on for this.” Peter might have been feeling this when he heard Jesus say, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.” (Mark 9:31) Even with Jesus having added, “and after three days rise again,” Peter’s rejection of the notion is immediate: “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”
I have been thinking this week of the disciple’s relationship with Jesus in terms of the covenant. Similar to the covenantal relationship of the children of Israel where God reminds them over and over again, “You will be my people, and I will be your God.” So Jesus is in a living relationship with these disciples, “I will be your Teacher, and you will be my followers. It is possible, that by this first warning Jesus gives of his own death, Peter and the others have already formed their sense of him as the Messiah.
They have heard teaching after teaching, parable after parable. They have witnessed miracle after miracle. Now he privately lays upon them that the Son of Man will inevitably go through much suffering and be utterly repudiated by religious figures of power, and be killed. What is Peter supposed to think? He determines he must straighten Jesus out. He may want to say, in their covenant, they follow him as teacher and Messiah, and together they will move forward with an irresistible conquest to establish the kingdom about which Jesus was always teaching. He does not get far, because Jesus straightens him out instead. He calls Peter the adversary and orders him to fall in line. It gets worse.
He clarifies that following him means they must give up all right to themselves, take up their crosses and come after him. He tells them that saving their lives will be a matter of losing their lives. Now they have the right picture of the covenant they share. What a difficult relationship of the promise it is! Jesus will not be a means to a personal end for any of them. For each of them, Jesus turns out to be the end in itself. Each finishes in complete union with their Master—a spiritual, very real union with the eternal Anointed One. It is the same for us all. However flawed or accurate is our sense of covenant with Jesus, if we stay on that path with him we will learn to be last of all and servant of all, and we will be brought into perfect union with him. That promise is sure.